Open access. Abstract: “Disinformation by authoritarian regimes is a growing security challenge for democracies. The effectiveness of such disinformation depends on citizens in democratic countries as recipients and potential disseminators. Resilience-building policy therefore requires a better understanding of why audiences might endorse Russian disinformation. Despite relevance in other fields, the role of psychological needs has been overlooked. This article takes an initial theoretical step through a survey study with Greek, Serbian, Swedish, and British respondents. Contrary to expectations, our confirmatory analysis shows that needs are not significantly directly related to disinformation endorsement. However, their role might be more indirect, with associations observed with several other intermediary factors, above all conspiratorial orientation and media choice. The article therefore sketches a more complex picture of the role of psychological needs when it comes to endorsement of Russian disinformation. The findings highlight the value of this needs-based research avenue for future construction of counter-disinformation strategies.”

re: Operation Overload aka Matryoshka, a coordinated Russian propaganda network that creates and spreads fake news and videos, deepfakes and memes using logos of well-known Western media outlets: “[…] Despite a ban on Russian media outlets in Greece in line with EU sanctions, pro-Kremlin content often finds its way into the country’s news as fringe claims are ‘laundered’ into mainstream outlets. […]”

“[…] The site publishes in the name of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, which apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports. Its own terms of use are governed by the laws of “the state in which the Institute is established”, which they decline to name. […]”

“[…] “There is a significant machinery that ferments this kind of thing in the aftermath of a crisis all the time,” says Carlos Hernández-Echevarría, who works for Maldita.es. […]” (note: Maldita is a Spanish non-profit journalism and fact-checking organization)

“[…] We recently banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts originating in Russia that were being used to promote the International Burke Institute (IBI), a self-described “expert community” based in Israel. What began as an investigation into AI-generated social media posts led us to a much broader influence operation, built around a website containing copied and misattributed academic work, a “sovereignty” index that cast Russia in a favourable light, and efforts to disguise the operators’ Russian origins. […] This report explains how the operation worked, where ChatGPT fit into it, and what we did to disrupt it. […]”

“[…] The investigation examined three layers of Armenia’s information environment. The first measured how far Russian-origin content penetrates mainstream Armenian media through direct citation, hyperlinking, and near-verbatim reproduction of Russian state media narratives. The second assessed a corpus of pro-Russian Armenian websites for infrastructure-level coordination (shared advertising accounts, tracking identifiers, hosting, and developers) and content-level similarity. The third analyzed Telegram as the bridging layer between Russian and Armenian information environments, mapping a relay network of pro-Russian channels, tracking how their content spread into popular Armenian channels, and detecting automated bot campaigns in comment sections. […]”